Sep 30 -- Artips' Philosophy, Eric Schmidt's Smart Emailing, Great Startup Habits and Great PMs, The Danger of Processes. The product philosophy of Artips. Artips co-founders Coline and Jean met at a startup weekend in Paris in fall 2012. They spent 54 hours designing and actually launching their product: a “daily dose of art”, as they pitch it, as it consists of three emails a week with witty anecdotes about arts. Here’s an example featuring Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (sorry non-French readers). I’m a subscriber and beta reader since the very beginning and I’ve honestly opened and read 98% of what they’ve sent to my inbox so far (subscribe here).
Being that loyal made me curious about what was so great in Artips, so I recently met with Jean to discuss their product philosophy. In short: dead simple and dead smart. Artips’ emails are not delivering exclusive news nor offering discounts or tips. “We give readers a breath of fresh air. “We also break down social barriers. I can’t help comparing Artips to Genius.
The comparison also brings the question of the destination website. Google's Eric Schmidt has these 9 rules for emailing. Communication in the Internet Century usually means using email, and email, despite being remarkably useful and powerful, often inspires momentous dread in otherwise optimistic, happy humans. Here are our personal rules for mitigating that sense of foreboding: Cover of 'How Google Works,' by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg How Google Works 1. Respond quickly. 2. 3. When you open a new message, you have a few options: Read enough of it to realize that you don’t need to read it, read it and act right away, read it and act later, or read it later (worth reading but not urgent and too long to read at the moment). If you do this well, then your inbox becomes a to‑do list of only the complex issues, things that require deeper thought (label these emails “take action,” or in Gmail mark them as starred), with a few “to read” items that you can take care of later. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Caption Settings Dialog Beginning of dialog window. How Google Makes its Doodles This is a modal window. There is No Such Thing as a Great Team, Only Great Habits. Sometimes, an investor gets lucky. They invest in a company with an idea that doesn't go anywhere, the company pivots, and you wind up in the next big thing. In hindsight, an investor will tell you that they knew they had backed a great team and that was the key to the investment. It's never luck. I have a lot of trouble with the "great team" scenario, because it just doesn't seem to play out in real life.
What about when a company clearly makes a stupid acquisition? When they spend hundreds of millions to buy you only to turn off your product and shut it off later, were you a great team, but you wouldn't have been a great team if you ran out of money two weeks earlier? Is greatness innate? Why don't all the people who have "great" entrepreneurial qualities succeed? It feels like a lot of hocus pocus half the time--where we mistake agressiveness and ambition for qualities of good management in startups. It's the same with culture.
It's very similar to my own experience with running. Designers + engineers + empathy = greatness | uncapitalized. Designers and engineers need a deeper understanding of each other’s craft to create truly great products. i’m convinced that engineers need to understand the experiences designers aim to create, even as designers need to understand just know how engineers will make those experience come to life. when the two groups interact for the greater good: they build phenomenal products, with minimal time resources. it’s all a matter of empathy — loosely defined as understanding the feelings and thinking of others. during my time leading engineering and design on webOS, and later at Twitter, i’ve learned that empathy is core to a product team’s ability to move quickly from designers’ “what” to engineers’ “how.” said differently, a designer knows what to make, and an engineer knows how to make it. when they overcome the communication barrier that separates the what and the how, good things are certain to come.
Like this: Like Loading... Product Hunt Blog — What Makes a Great Product Manager? 10 Product Experts Weigh In. Hackers and Painters. May 2003 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.) When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.
Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. I've never liked the term "computer science. " Sometimes what the hackers do is called "software engineering," but this term is just as misleading. What and how should not be kept too separate. Perhaps one day "computer science" will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this. Process Is Being Told What to Do by Someone Who Has Less Information than You. Burn Rates: How Much? In the comments to last week's Burn Rate post, I was asked to share some burn rates from our portfolio. I can't do that. But an alternative suggestion was to write a post suggesting some reasonable burn rates at different stages. I can do that and so that's the topic of today's post. The following applies to software based businesses, and most particularly web and mobile software businesses.
It does not apply to hardware, life sciences, and energy startups. Building Product Stage – I would strongly recommend keeping the monthly burn below $50k per month at this stage. Building Usage Stage – I would recommend keeping the monthly burn below $100k per month at this stage. Building The Business Stage – This is when you've determined that your product market fit has been obtained and you now want to build a business around the product or service. A good rule of thumb is multiply the number of people on the team by $10k to get the monthly burn. One final caveat – there are outliers.